In recent years, visible-light communication apparatuses have been developed, each designed to transmit and receive data by modulating and demodulating visible light with the data. The visible-light communication apparatus has a reception unit that uses an image sensor to acquire the data carried by the visible light transmitted after undergoing image processing. The reception unit is composed of an optical system including lenses, an image sensor and an image processing unit.
The reception unit indeed determines the state of receiving visible light at the photographing object confirming unit provided in a digital photographing apparatus. In order to achieve reliable acquisition of the data transmitted by visible-light communication, however, image processing must be performed to extract the data in the form of a data bit train. Moreover, the data must be processed by a simple and inexpensive image processing apparatus, not by a complex and expensive image processing apparatus.